Wanderer
by Empatheia
Summary: [Luna x Alice] There is one door left open still.


**A/N:** Written for the Girls Like Girls comment ficathon on LJ.

Prompt: _the tea is odd, the girl is odder_

Sequel in spirit to _Pale Queen_.

x

Luna walks into the Room of Requirement and thinks iElsewhere./i

Obligingly, the Room becomes a hole, and she falls for a while, first down then sideways. The hole ends with a door, set into the floor which is a wall which is a ceiling, and when she reaches out it opens for her, as is always the way.

Was always the way, she amends to herself. No longer.

She greatly misses the days of her earlier youth, before Alice closed the dreaming doors, when falling asleep had been all she needed to do to find her way to the world beneath the world that is. It's hard, now; she's tried many things, and some of them have worked, but all of them only ever once.

It's a hard thing, to be exiled from the home of one's heart. All her life, she has spent her nights in the land beyond and below her dreams, wandering away from the real in the soft hours of the night. All her life she has found joy and solace elsewhere. Now she can't, and now she is tired when she has never been tired before.

What use is sleeping now, if the doors are shut?

As a child, Luna rarely slept except to dream, and now she finds it difficult, unnatural. Before, she had found no rest there, only adventures, but she had no complaints. What child would, to spend each day's sullen shadow talking to flowers and riding on the backs of smiling cats?

(The healers think that might be why she is so... so much herself, now, always so much apart from the world. They say it does a mind good to rest, and hers spent years and years without. They might be right, she admits when she's feeling uncomfortably reasonable, but she hates it. She hates to drink down those bitter flasks of dreamless sleep, hates to lie insensate in the dark like so much ordinary flesh and sinew, mired in the small and ordinary dreams of her mortal body. It's a little death and it frightens her.)

There are still open doors, of course, because Underland would die without them, asphyxiated. They're just better hidden, less accessible. Most of their number, though, are closed now. The border to the dreaming world is shut up like a high stone cliff, and the foxholes and sinkholes and old wells dotting the hills and valleys of the real are just holes, with ordinary bottoms of earth or stone. Anyone falling down them would break their necks and go nowhere but the afterlife of their choice.

Underland is not an afterlife. Underland is a now-life, an ever-life, both more and less than real. No holding place for the disintegrating souls of the dead, no matter what one calls it.

She is twenty-six now and it has been two years since she's been back. The door in the thicket near her home failed her, eventually, the gnarled gap between the willows leading to nothing but dirt and dead grasses. She had cried for a while, sitting in the dust with only the grasshoppers for company. Then she had gone looking for others, in ever-expanding circles, finding nothing.

So now she is visiting a place that was also home once, searching for the way through it to an older one.

This was the last door she had any hope of, and she is so relieved to find it open that she cries all the down, all the way in.

The door opens, and she is beneath the world, home at last.

Alice is there to greet her, sitting perched on a mossy rock as if she's been waiting there for days, golden head tilted up to the singing canopy of the familiar forest. For all Luna knows, she has. Alice always knows.

(Luna has never been sure whether that's a privilege granted to Underland's queens or if it's just because it's Alice, the soul this world chose for its own all those years ago.)

Either way, she has been ruling here with her sisters for nearly a hundred and fifty years, the pale queen, last of four, and one gets to know a place in a span of time like that even if time doesn't run quite the way it ought.

Alice might have felt the door opening an hour ago, a week ago, a year ago, and walked over on the wind at her leisure. There is magic in the real world, but Underland iis/i magic. Possibility is its nature, unreality its only rule. It's especially bad at time. Luna has always liked that about it.

"I was beginning to wonder if you were ever coming back," Alice says mildly, rising to reach out her hands.

Luna takes them, tilting her head. "I was beginning to think you didn't want me to," she says, also mild in her reproach. "If you did, you wouldn't have shut all the doors in my face."

A flicker of regret mars Alice's sun-dappled face, just for a moment. "Not all of them," she says defensively. "I left some. But you know why it was necessary."

That much is true, and why Luna can't really be angry with her.

Underland is fragile, and cannot bear the weight of many visitors. There are many more people in the world now, billions more, but the proportion of dreamers amongst them has not changed, and so there are many more dreamers and wanderers than there ever have been before. Alice left the borders open as long as she could, until Underland began to fray and collapse about its edges, being a wanderer herself and not wishing to deny others the chance to find their home. Even her great magic has limits, though, and she had made the only choice she could when she reached them.

No, Luna does not begrudge her that, however sad and difficult it has made things for her. Nor can she begrudge the world for forcing Alice to it. It was only acting according to its nature, mindless on the whole, desperate to grow.

Still, it is so good to be home, so sweet. She has missed this more than she has let herself feel, denying much for fear of her heart breaking beyond repair.

She is home. Underland curves upwards around her, land of mirror and shadow. The flowers are singing and the chatterbirds are pontificating and it has probably been teatime on this gentle autumn day for years. In some nearby clearing the Hatter will be serving crumpets to the March Hare; she can almost taste them. Far off she can hear the dignified roaring of the White Queen's waterfall, sourceless and eternal. Home.

Alice is smiling, still holding Luna's hands between hers. She is human still, despite her immortality, and so her hands are warm. Something like enough to blood still runs beneath her skin.

She is beautiful. She will be beautiful until the end of every world.

"You know you are always welcome," Alice says softly, raising one hand to stroke Luna's hair, tuck it behind her ear. "Whenever you are ready."

Luna frowns. It's not like Alice to be cruel. "You know yourself that a life given has to be lived until the end," Luna says, a little sharply, not without regret. "You stayed real until you ran out of time because you had to, and so will I. I know better than to bring all my unspent time here. I can visit, for a little while, but if I were to make up my mind to stay with all those years still hanging over me, it would weigh me down until I could hardly move. I would carry my frustrated mortality everywhere I went, regretting, unable to move forward or go back, trapped and suffering."

"I'm sorry," Alice says immediately, shame written all over her lovely face. "I'm sorry, you're right, it was cruel of me to tempt you. It's just that the world is lesser without you, little moon." She kisses Luna's forehead, a more potent apology.

"I miss you, too," Luna says after a moment, biting her lip. "I always miss you. And I can't get to Hogwarts very often, so I'll miss you a lot more before the end. But it can't be helped, can it."

It can't, and they both know it. Reality has no heart with which to be kind.

Alice smiles ruefully, fondly. "There is no one like you in any world, Luna Lovegood."

"There's you," says Luna.

 **END**


End file.
